Of every UFO incident ever recorded, the Phoenix lights incident stands out because it had the most witnesses. Tens of thousands of people watched UFOs over the states of Nevada and Arizona on March 13 1997, most of them being in the city of Phoenix, Arizona.

The strange events reported that day started at 6.55pm (Pacific Time) in Henderson, Nevada. A young man saw a V-shaped craft, about the size of a Boeing 747 airliner, showing six large lights. He watched it pass overhead, making a wind noise and later lost sight of it over the horizon.

At 8.15pm (Mountain Time) a former police officer reported a cluster of five reddish-orange lights in Paulden, Arizona, with one light apart from the other four. He was able to view the lights with binoculars for around two minutes and see that each light was made up of two smaller light sources. He heard no sound coming from the lights.

Following these two sightings were a flurry of sightings reported to UFO investigators, law enforcement offices, the media and the local Luke AFB, all from the north and west of Phoenix. The reports did not follow much of a pattern, nor did many of the reports back each other up, many different types of craft were reported. There were different numbers, colors and speeds of lights reported but a common theme was that the craft were extremely large.

A large V-Shaped craft was reported all the way from leaving Las Vegas and crossing the state line, down through Phoenix and as far as Tuscon, a 300 mile journey. North of Phoenix, three witnesses saw a huge wedge-shaped craft with five lights glide over them towards the mountains to the south. The object was reported to have covered 70 to 90 degrees of the sky. Near the corner of Indian School Road and 7th Avenue, a mother and her four daughters saw a craft shaped like sergeants' stripes approach them from Camelback Mountain. It hovered above them for around five minutes, taking up more than 30 to 40 degrees of the sky. As the object moved off in the direction of Sky Harbor International Airport it fired a beam of light downwards. Two air traffic controllers on the Sky Harbour tower and many pilots reported seeing the craft. A former airline pilot in Scottsdale, Arizona was amongst the witnesses who reported seeing an object showing many lights pass overhead on its way to the mountains south of Phoenix


Luke AFB
A family driving along Interstate 10 near Casa Grande, Arizona reported an object directly above their car. They claim that it took them a full two minutes, driving at 80mph to get from the front of the object to the back, even though it was heading roughly south, away from Phoenix and they were heading roughly north. This would make the craft around 3 miles in length.

A man from Luke AFB reported to the National UFO Reporting Center that two USAF F-15c fighter jets had been scrambled and had intercepted one of the craft reported over the area on March 13. The man later went quiet but Bill Grenier, a truck driver, who was driving toward Glendale, Arizona reported seeing two aircraft take off from Luke AFB and head towards a bright object he had noticed moments earlier. The bright object reacted by rapidly gaining altitude until it had outrun the jets and disappeared from view.


Bill Grenier
The main incident of March 13 1997 happened between 9.30pm and 10.00pm (Mountain Time) where a line of seven to nine exceptionally bright lights appeared and later disappeared one by one, just beyond the Estrella mountain range, adjacent to Phoenix. The formation of lights which may have been separate orbs or a single, enormous craft was seen and videotaped by numerous members of the public living in Phoenix and were later reported over Rainbow Valley at 2.00am on March 14. Mysteriously, the lights over Phoenix just before 10.00pm did not make national news until ten weeks later, when USA Today carried a front-page article on June 18 1997.


The Phoenix Lights
The military initially kept quiet about the lights over Phoenix but in May 1997 Luke AFB announced that after an investigation, the lights were flares from an A-10 Warthog aircraft over the Gila Ben 'Barry M. Goldwater' Firing Range. The skeptics, and some UFOlogists accepted this explanation, especially after a local television crew made footage of flares being used on a military exercise. The flares recorded by the television crew were of the same type LUU-2 flares that Luke AFB had claimed were dropped near Phoenix on March 13.

For most, the mystery was now but there were still UFOlogists and residents of Phoenix that were not satisfied by the flares explanation. It had been debated as to whether the lights had disappeared because they had fallen down behind the mountains, which would be in-line with them being flares or if they had ceased to emit light. The unsatisfied people called for the aid of Jim Dilettoso and Michael Tanner of Village Labs, a professional investigative agency. They investigated the incident and events of March 13 1997 in general but it was their comparison of the footage of the Phoenix Lights taken around 10.00pm and footage of known type LUU-2 taken by the television crew. They found that although too the naked eye the lights looked remarkably similar, when they analyzed the lights using specialist software, they found that the optical properties were very much different. In their opinion, this proves that the Phoenix lights were not type LUU-2 flares as the USAF had suggested.


TV crew footage of LUU-2 flares
Jeff Willes, a resident of Phoenix, experienced in filming UFOs, dealt a further blow to the flares theory when he showed his footage of very bright lights over Phoenix, similar to the lights at 10.00pm, but from earlier in the day on March 13 1997. Willes made a thirty minute tape of three independent bright orbs of light moving very slowly around the sky, being sure to show the mountain range in the background for comparisons of scale. The lights in Willes' video needed to scientific comparison to show they were not flares and his footage was included on the local Fox 10 News broadcast alongside the famous footage from later in the evening. It is not known what relation Willes' lights had to any of the objects reported that day.


Jeff Willes' footage